


Family Portraits

by carolinecrane



Category: While You Were Sleeping (1995)
Genre: Christmas Fluff, F/M, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-19
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-05 03:19:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1088984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carolinecrane/pseuds/carolinecrane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It didn't take long for Lucy to fit into the Callaghan family traditions.  Sometimes Jack even thinks his family likes her better than they like him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Family Portraits

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dimensionallyt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimensionallyt/gifts).



“So, are you ready for this?”

“Are you?” Lucy asked, laughing at Jack’s grimace. He guided her up the front steps anyway, a hand on her back to keep her steady as they crossed the front porch to the door. Before they reached it, the door flew open, and Mary let out a squeal that made him wince before she launched herself at Lucy.

“Hey, hey, precious cargo,” Jack said, but Lucy was already laughing and hugging Mary back.

“They’re here!” Mary called over her shoulder, and Jack heard his mom make a noise not that far off from the one Mary had made a minute ago.

“Lucy,” Midge called from the entry, “come in out of the cold before you catch your death. Mary, don’t keep her standing out there in her condition.”

“I’m fine,” Lucy insisted, but she let Mary pull her into the warmth of the house.

“And I’m chopped liver,” Jack muttered to himself, following the women inside and pulling the front door closed behind him. “Nice to see you too, Ma.”

“Jack, go help Saul and your father before they set the house on fire,” Midge said, gesturing toward the living room.

Jack opened his mouth to remind her that he hadn’t even taken his coat off yet, but she was already herding Lucy toward the kitchen, Mary trailing behind them. 

“Ma’s almost done making her egg nog. Lucky for you, you’ve got an excuse to avoid it this year,” Midge said, dropping her voice so Elsie wouldn’t overhear them.

Jack watched them go until they disappeared through the kitchen door, smiling when Lucy cast an apologetic glance at him over her shoulder. The truth was he knew Lucy loved spending time with his family, especially around the holidays. Jack had been around them for so long that he took them for granted, but for her it was still pretty new, the idea of having people to expect her to show up and to make demands on her time.

He snorted a laugh at the thought and wondered all over again how long it would take her to get just as sick of it as he was. 

“See? You’re smothering it,” Ox was saying as Jack walked into the living room. “Would you let me do it already?”

“Did you two want to be alone? Because I can come back,” Jack said.

Ox scowled and poked at the smoldering pile of firewood and newspaper that Jack was pretty sure was supposed to be burning merrily by now. “Your mother wants a fire. She says it’s more traditional. For Lucy.”

“Lucy doesn’t care about a fire,” Jack said, but he crossed the living room to kneel next to his dad anyway, reaching out to take the poker before anyone got hurt. “Here, let me.”

He spent a couple minutes trying to rearrange the logs so they’d let the fire grow instead of smothering it as soon as it started, then he lit the ends of the newspaper and watched while the flames rose and caught on the ends of the logs.

“So is Peter gracing us with his presence this year?” Jack asked, setting the poker back in its stand and straightening up to look at his father. 

“He and Ashley went to Paris for the holiday,” Ox answered in a tone that let Jack know exactly what Ox thought of one of his kids spending Christmas in a foreign country instead of with his family. Then again, Peter hadn’t showed up for Christmas since college, so it wasn’t as though any of them were surprised.

“Still, at least Mary made it home.” Jack clapped his father on the shoulder, squeezing for a second before he let go. 

There had been some talk about Mary going skiing with her college friends instead of coming back to Chicago for her first Christmas away from home, but in the end Lucy had called and managed to persuade her. Jack was pretty sure she hadn’t even been trying, but something about the way Lucy talked about their family always managed to remind them of how good they had it.

Well, everyone except Peter, anyway. Even Lucy recognized a lost cause. Eventually.

Before Jack had a chance to follow that thought down a path he preferred not to take, Lucy herself appeared, flanked by Midge on one side and Mary on the other. Jack smiled at the sight of her walking arm in arm with his mother and sister, the two of them fussing over her as though she was breakable. Not that he hadn’t been doing the same thing lately, and now that she was getting closer to her due date, she’d even stopped complaining about it.

“All right, everybody around the fireplace,” Midge said, shooing Ox and Saul back toward the hearth. “Ma, come on, we’re taking the picture.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Elsie called from the kitchen. She appeared a second later, cheeks rosy from testing her egg nog.

“Lucy, you and Jack stand in the center here.” Midge jostled Ox out of the way and arranged Jack and Lucy right in front of the fireplace, reaching up to smooth Lucy’s hair back before she turned to Mary. 

“Shouldn’t you and Dad be in the middle?” Jack asked, glancing sideways at Lucy. “Heads of the family and all that?”

“Don’t be silly, I want my first grandchild to be front and center in her first Christmas picture,” Midge answered without looking at him. She arranged Mary next to Lucy, then Elsie on her other side.

“I think technically next year will be the baby’s first Christmas,” Jack said, “and we don’t know if we’re having a boy or girl, Ma.”

“A grandmother knows,” Midge said, and this time she did look at him long enough to fix him with a glare that told him arguing would be a waste of breath.

Next to him Lucy stifled a giggle, then she reached for his hand and squeezed. “Come on, Jack, let her have her picture.”

“Yeah, just be thankful she didn’t make us wear the matching sweaters,” Mary said, leaning over Lucy to whisper to Jack. “Why do you think I wanted to skip Christmas this year?”

“I thought it was so you could drink too much with your friends in a cabin somewhere in Wisconsin.”

Mary narrowed her eyes and opened her mouth to answer him, but Lucy shushed them both as Midge stood back to survey her arrangement. Ox was standing next to Jack now, Saul on his other side, and Elsie was next to Mary. 

“Ma, move in a little closer,” Midge said, looking through the viewfinder of the digital camera Jack and Lucy had given her for her birthday. “Saul, you too.”

They all jostled a little closer, Lucy pressing into Jack’s side as he slid an arm around her shoulders. She rested her head on his shoulder as Midge hurried across the room, wedging herself in between Jack and Ox. Jack turned to press a kiss to the top of Lucy’s head just as the camera’s timer went off, then he laughed when Midge ordered them all not to move while she checked the picture.

“Jack, you moved,” she said, frowning at him accusingly. “We’ll have to do it again.”

“Jack,” Mary moaned at the same moment his dad smacked him on the back of the head.

“Jeez, sorry,” Jack said, but he looked right at the camera and smiled this time.

Once Midge declared the second take ‘good enough’, they all relaxed, and Mary grabbed Lucy’s arm and pulled her away from Jack to tell her another story about her roommate at college. Jack walked over to his mother where she was still fiddling with the camera, looking over her shoulder to inspect the picture.

“To be honest, I wasn’t sure you’d get the hang of this thing,” he said, smirking when she looked over her shoulder at him.

“You bought me a birthday gift you didn’t think I’d use?”

“Well, Lucy has more faith in your patience for new technology than I do.”

“She’s a catch, that girl,” Midge said, turning back to the camera to unscrew it from the tripod. It was the same thing she’d said to him when he first went to his family to tell them he wanted to propose to Lucy, and he couldn’t help smiling at the memory.

Midge pressed a button on the camera and the view screen showed the first picture she’d taken, the one where everyone was smiling at the camera except Jack, who’d turned to press his lips against Lucy’s forehead.

“Do me a favor, don’t delete that one,” he said.

Midge looked up at him again, her expression sharp, but when she caught sight of his smile, her features softened. “Sure, honey. I’ll email it to you.”

“You’re emailing people now?” Jack said, grinning when she swatted him on the arm. 

“I had to learn once Mary left for school, didn’t I? Besides, that way you can email me all the baby pictures and I won’t have to miss anything.”

“Something tells me you’ll be taking as many baby pictures as we will,” Jack said, but he slid an arm around his mother’s shoulders to pull her into a hug. Over his shoulder he caught sight of Lucy watching him from across the room, and when she smiled and gave him a little wave, his heart hammered the same way it did that first time they met in his parents’ foyer.

He let go of his mother, waiting until she patted his cheek before he excused himself and made his way across the room to his wife. 

“How’s everybody doing over here?” he asked, reaching down to cover her hand where it was resting on her swollen stomach.

“I’m fine, Jack. The baby’s fine too. Everything’s fine,” she said, in that tone that told him he’d asked that same question one too many times today.

“You do know that once this little guy makes an appearance, you’re never getting rid of my mother.”

Lucy laughed, glancing across the room to make sure Midge was still out of earshot. “It won’t be that bad. She has to go home sometime, right?”

Jack raised an eyebrow at her and she laughed again. “You’ve met her, right?”

“Look at the bright side,” Lucy answered, her smile turning mischievous. “Free babysitting.”

“Are you kidding? Between Ma, Ox, and Mary, we’ll be lucky if our kid recognizes us.” Jack smiled and pulled Lucy close, pressing his lips to her cheek to whisper near her ear. “Maybe we should have taken a page from Peter’s book and gone away for Christmas. This was our last chance.”

He felt Lucy’s smile against his own cheek, then she pressed a kiss to his skin and pulled back to look at him. “I like being here for Christmas. It wouldn’t be the same without your family.”

“ _Our_ family,” he reminded her, hand on her belly again to feel the baby move. “And I think the kid agrees with you, so I guess I’m outvoted.”

Lucy laughed at that and covered his hand with her own. “You can’t fool me. You love them just as much as they love you.”

“Yeah,” Jack murmured, glancing over Lucy’s shoulder to watch his mother fussing over the way Mary was setting the table. “You got me there.”


End file.
